Maybe that’s it, the real success of Windows 95. Having transformed a series of technical gestures into a culture. Have imposed an interface, a user manual, a framework. The domestic PC, as we know it, is a collective creation. But Microsoft was the first company at the package, spread it, freeze it, to crystallize a vision of reproducible computers and accessible to millions of users and users, both ergonomically and financial.
So no, Windows 95 did not invent consumer computers. He standardized it. He made it banal. And it is this trivialization which, even today, shapes our way of using a computer. The system has disappeared from the machines. But his use model continues to turn everywhere
It is also so installed that you almost forget that it had to be invented. However, Microsoft, today, may be about to redefine the contours. With Windows 12 – or at least, what we press as such – the firm promises an omnipresent, contextual, capable assistant assistant and act even before it is asked. If this promise materialized, it would mark a major turning point. An agency turn, which would possibly sign the end of the frozen paradigm for three decades – that of a passive system, wedged on familiar gestures.
And in this case, the domestic PC could well engage in a new chapter. In its way as structuring as that began in 1995.